Computers today, are now becoming a major part of everyday life, through business, learning, recreation, communication, etc. Many people do not actually hold a great knowledge of computers, let alone their own.In this post I will be aiming to talk a bit about computers and raise your understanding.
I will try to go over this in a kind of cycle. First of all, i shall begin with the area that many people may know more about than anything else, the hard drive. This is where all your information is stored on the computer. It is a disc slightly larger than a CD and alot thicker. The Hard drive stored tonnes of data in files that vary in size.
Information is kind of hard to explain, but the basic idea is that files are recorded in bytes. the hard drive stored many of these bytes, or units of information. This is more often refferred to as disk space, when talking about how much a computer can store on its hard drive. There is a type of metric system for telling how much info something holds. it goes like this:
the base unit is in bytes. eg: 128 bytes.
the amount of bytes in a file can extrend way past 1,000,000 units, so you will find yourself with files that have thousands of bytes of space being used up. The unit for 1,000 bytes is a "kilobyte". eg: 128 kb (128,000 bytes)
One of the more common units you would hear about is in the millions range. this will be "megabytes". eg: 2.6mb (2,600,000 bytes)
finally, when you hear about storage capabilities on a hard drive, you are most likely to hear about "gigabytes". 1 gigabyte is as much as 1 billion bytes of storage space.
The hard drive is constantly reading and recording information, and sending what info we need to the memory of the computer, called the Random Access Memory.
Known as the RAM, The primary purpose is to hold on to the info that came from the hard drive. RAM is often referred to as memory and is constantly confused with disk space.
Your RAM comes in long thin "slides" (which have about 8 chips on them) and go into the RAM slots. The RAM slides can have variable amount of memory on them, from 64mb to about 1Gb each. (Most computers can take about 2 or 3 RAM slides)
The RAM stores the information it is currently using for operations on the computer, and passes it on to the CPU, or "Central Proccessing Unit". i'll go over that another time.
The RAM is usually recieving info, storing this info on the chips, and sending it to the CPU. Whenever the memory is full, or a program has reached the maximum allocated amount of memory, the older data on the memory is replaced with new information that is required for the running of your computer. This means that if you are running several programs at a time, your computer is more likely to be quite slow if you dont have very much memory. So technically, the more RAM the better, as it means the info on the memory is not as often being replaced. These days, most computers come with about 256mb of RAM, 128mb at the very least. The maximum depends on the number of RAM slots you have, and at the moment you can get up to 1Gb for each slot.
I'll put up some more technical stuff about computers another time.

Thanks,

Gives a good rundown of what all those specs mean in the brochures etc